The purge continues. Please, please, please read this with care before sending me a note about buying any tools.
If you subscribe to our blog via e-mail, click through to the page to see if the tool you want has been sold. As soon as the tool is sold, I will mark it as “sold” here on the blog.
All prices include domestic shipping. I apologize for this, but I don’t have time now to wait in the line at USPS for 30 minutes per order to ship international packages. If you have a U.S. address, we’re golden.
Ask me all the questions you like about an item. But the first one to say “I’ll take it” gets it. After I receive your your payment, I will ship the tool to you. If I don’t get your payment within two weeks, the piece goes back up for sale.
To buy an item, send an e-mail to chris@lostartpress.com and in the subject line please put the name of the item you want. If you say “I’ll take it,” and I don’t know what item you want, confusion ensues.
Only once in the last 21 years have I gotten my act together during the holidays and made woodworking gifts for friends and family. Except for that “cutting boards Christmas” I’ve been too swamped with making a living to do the right thing.
So if you think I made those spatulas in the photo above, you are dead wrong. You can thank Rachael Boyd, one of the readers of the blog, for this clever idea for scraps.
Rachael used stock that was 3/4″ x 2-1/4″ x 10″ long. She says she made the first one by drawing it freehand, cut it to rough shape with a coping saw and tapered the main area with a spokeshave.
She saved the best one as a template.
“I have a feeling I will need to make a lot more in the future,” she writes. “If you make these be prepared to make a lot of them ‘cause everyone loves them.”
The straight spatula shown above is made from a cutoff from a tapered leg that she took to the disc sander to finish up. (I have a bunch of these taper pieces in my shop, so this is the one I might make from some teak cutoffs.)
Thanks to Rachael for saving Christmas.
— Christopher Schwarz, who can feel his liver growing two sizes that day
Suzanne Ellison prepared this montage of swimming ducks from A.-J. Roubo’s “The Book of Plates” (plates 98, 294, 319 and 349) to remind you that you have only a day or so to order “The Book of Plates” and have any hope of it being delivered before Christmas.
Also worth noting: We are shipping this book (and all of our books) via Priority mail until the end of 2014. After that, we will be switching to another system of mailing books. It will be more reliable, likely a little faster than Media Mail and definitely more expensive.
So take advantage of us while you can. Shipping will be more expensive in 2015 (can you hear us, California?).
Small beads – 1/4”, 3/16” and 1/8” – are ideal for creating shadow lines and transitions between flat boards. The classic example is with tongue-and-groove backboards. If you add a bead on the face of every board with a tongue, the back will look finished, instead of something that has oddly spaced cracks.
But beads aren’t just decorative. They also protect corners. If I have an arris (a mid-falutin’ word for “corner”) that is vulnerable to damage, a bead can strengthen it.
Shown above is a classic example: These runners in this tool chest are going to get a lot of wear, and their corners are going to get whacked by tools and wood. By beading each corner, it is much less likely to splinter in service.
The beads also look nice.
And now that I have three beading plane sizes, I can even scale my beads – wider ones at the bottom and smaller ones at the top. Joy! Nerd!
When I finally get to point where I’ve answered all my e-mail (sometime about July 2026), I might write a supplement or revision to the last bit of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” to include more construction information on different chests and the principles of their interiors.
When I wrote that book in 2010, I considered the chest in the book to be more of an idea than something that a reader would really build. I love (that’s the correct word) working out of a full-size floor chest and have since about 1997. But most people I talk to think it makes as much sense as using a gerbil to pull a plow.
This week I’m fitting out a traveling chest for an upcoming article in Popular Woodworking Magazine and am designing the interior to take advantage of every millimeter. Here are a few of the thought processes I use when designing the vertical space of a traveling chest (floor chests are different). Here’s a crude, shop-made sketch of the chest’s elevation in section.
The Bottom Well With a typical traveling chest, you aren’t going to be able to store your moulding planes on their toes – that would take up about 10” of your vertical space. So you store them on their soles so they eat up less of the chest’s height.
If you use panels saws – which is typical if you use a traveling chest – you need to be able to accommodate the full height of the saw’s tote. The saw tills on my traveling chests grab the panel saws at their toes. The heel of the blade rests on the floor of the chest.
And you need to be able to put your bench planes on the floor of the chest with their soles on the floor of the chest. If you use tools with a high cutting angle (moulders or bench planes), you have to be careful and measure their heights.
So when I design the bottom well, I start with a height of 6-1/4”. Unless you have any unusually tall bench planes or panel saws, that’s a good starting measurement.
The Top Till After drawing out the bottom well, the next step is to sketch the top sliding till. This is the till that usually gets all your small tools that you use constantly – layout tools, block planes a mallet, wax, knives etc. So this till is generally not very tall. I have found that a till that is 2-3/4” is a good overall height. When you figure that the till’s bottom will eat up 1/4” of that height it leaves you with an interior height of 2-1/2”. I really like this height.
When positioning the top till in the chest, I like to leave a 1/4” (or so) bit of airspace above the top till. This gap prevents damage to your tools or chest if you slam the lid and a couple of your tools are accidentally piled on top of each other.
What’s Left Then you divvy up the space between the top till and the bottom well. If the overall chest isn’t tall, I might put in another 2-3/4”-tall till. But I’d rather have a deeper till that is good for storing tool rolls, boxes of augers, my brace, hand drill and the like. If I can get a till that is at least 5” tall in there, then I’m pretty happy. If I can get a slightly taller one in there, even better. Once you approach 7” deep, however, it becomes a junk drawer.
